Monday, December 29, 2014

CIA Torture Report

Revelations
of torture practiced by the CIA have set off a number of passionate
debates.

There
are some CIA employees who, when asked to torture prisoners, refused
and left the agency. Their reason: “America does not torture.”
Wish it were true! We do not have to go back to times of slavery but
only pay attention to what happens in our prisons today, to know that
that boast is empty. America does torture.

A more interesting debate goes back
and forth about the efficacy of torture. Opponents assert that the
information gained from torture is completely unreliable. The current
and previous heads of the agency insist that torture yielded
information which actually saved lives by preventing other terrorist
attacks. Unfortunately the information on which such claims rest is
classified and we have to just trust them.

This debate is interesting for its
background. It only makes sense to argue about the effectiveness of
torture if you are willing to say that torture that prevents other
terrorist incidents is justified. If you believe that America ought
not to torture—whatever the outcome -- it is pointless to argue
about the actual results of torture. If torture is morally wrong and
you will not sacrifice morality for security, the question of
outcomes is irrelevant.

Here
some readers will chime in and say something like “The ends do not
justify the means.” But that only serves to muddy the waters. In
all sorts of situations, we
believe that the end does justify the means. Many people believe in
the death penalty. We
are willing to kill people for
the sake of closure for the victim's family or for the sake of
discouraging people from committing horrible crimes. Everyone is
willing to have a life saving operation however painful. Many women
are willing to go through the excruciating pain of natural childbirth
for the sake of having
a healthy baby.

In many situations we do believe
that the end justified the means. Does national security justify
torturing suspects?

In
the conduct of foreign policy, not only the CIA, but the US
government,
as a whole, is completely unscrupulous. Here is a chilling example I
came across recently.

The
Ebola epidemic in Liberia got as bad as it is because the early
warnings by the Liberian government were not heeded by the
population. The Liberian government is widely distrusted by the
population, not only for being massively corrupt, but even more
because the President, Ellen Sirleaf, was involved with the different
dictatorial regimes that wreaked havoc in Liberia in the 1980s and
1990s. These military insurgencies were sponsored and supported by
the CIA because the Liberian government of the 1970s was thought to
lean to the left and was therefore not acceptable to us. So the CIA
unleashed a civil war that killed thousands, drove many more from
their homes into exile in neighboring countries, and destroyed the
political structure of the country. One long term effect is that the
government is so unpopular that many Liberians believe that the Ebola
epidemic was the work of the government.

The
blatant immorality of our foreign policy makes us fiercely hated and
often ridiculed.
It makes us ever less safe as it inspires fanatical hatred of the US
and motivates more and more people to set out to hurt us.

Worse, we act as unscrupulously and
morally reprehensibly as the worst of our enemies. For the sake of
what we—often mistakenly—believe to be our interest we are
willing to bring down the scourges of totalitarian regimes, civil
war, massive killing and displacement of populations. We are
indifferent to the suffering we impose on millions of people all
around the globe.

Is there any doubt that that is
completely unacceptable?

Here is a good resolution for the
New Year: Congress must defund the CIA.

Monday, December 22, 2014

Are you happy?

For the last 20 years or so, social
science researchers have studied human happiness by going around and
asking many people whether they are happy. One thing they discovered
was that most people draw a sharp line between the happiness of their
life over all, and their current condition. Someone may be confined
to a hospital bed in acute pain after a serious accident and complain
about that while saying at the same time that their life, all and
all, is a happy one. Someone else may be having pleasant experiences,
lazing around on the beach without worries about money, in the
company of good friends, but nevertheless feel profoundly sad and
discouraged about life as a whole.

Happiness as a whole is different
from happiness in the moment the social scientists conclude. They are
confident that their results are reliable. They trust the information
gleaned from their questionnaires.

But the project is misguided for two
reasons.

What the questionnaires tell them is
not about human happiness but about the pressures we feel in our
society to do well, to succeed, to be happy. From the day we were
born we are told that in the United States everybody can make their
life better; everyone can make something of him or herself. The clear
implication is that, barring extraordinary misfortunes, if your life
does not turn out well it is because you didn't work hard enough or
made bad choices. If you are unhappy you have, most likely, only
yourself to blame.

In a world that raises these
expectations you would not expect people to admit that their life is
a disappointment to them. They may admit to current, temporary
problems while insisting that they are nevertheless a happy person.

Asking people whether they are happy
does not tell you much about what their life is like and more about
what they feel they ought to think about it.

But asking people about their
happiness is misguided for another reason. Once you receive answers
to your questionnaires you are no wiser than you were before. What is
someone telling you who says he is happy? He might be saying that his
life is exciting. There is great promise of good work, of interesting
collaborations. He is deeply embedded in his family life and marvels
at his children growing up. But of course he might be telling you
something very different. He might think that his life is not too
bad, that it might have turned out a lot worse than it did, even
though it is a bit of a disappointment. Someone else might say she is
happy because she thinks that all the many troubles she is enduring
now are simply the price she is paying for happiness in the
afterlife, sitting near the throne of God and rejoicing with the
choirs of angels.

Someone who tells you he is happy is
not giving you a lot of information. He may simply not want to talk
to about his life, or may be too indolent to think about it. The many
questions thoughtful persons raise about their life are very
different.

This person may think their life is
monotonous; they are bored. They then need to try to explore what
else they could do that would make their life more interesting, more
varied, less predictable. They need to think about how much structure
they need, how regular their days have to unfold. They need to ask
themselves what seems to keep them imprisoned in their present
condition,
why they have not already
spiced up their life.

Another may think that the days are
too crowded, that they have no time to sit quietly and catch their
breath. Which of the things they do are important, which of them are
important to them? Which ones can be dropped? Can they get some help
to unload some tasks?

There is a good deal of sadness in
human life. One does not meet one's expectations in one's career.
This splendid future one was anticipating does not materialize. A
beloved partner dies. One becomes old and infirm.

It takes considerable wisdom and
good friends to find one's way through all of that. But it is not as
good a life if one does not try to face those specific difficulties.

One must attend to the specifics of
each day to make one's life good. Talk about happiness is so general
and indistinct that it obscures what it takes to live as good a life
as one is able to and as good a life as one's circumstances allow
one. It is a distraction to keep us from thinking.

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Thanksgiving and World Hunger

It is
Thanksgiving time. Colleges
all over the US have
Hunger
Day festivities designed to acquaint them with the facts of World
Hunger. At best they might also learn that 14.5 million households
in the US suffer from hunger. There are close to 16 million children
in those underfed households.

But in
these Hunger Day events no questions are raised about the causes of
all this poverty. We
are certainly rich enough that no one need go hungry.

Nevertheless poverty is rampant, at home
as well and abroad. In my last blog I pointed out that domestic
poverty is due to the failure of our brand of free market capitalism
to create enough jobs and to create jobs that pay enough to allow
people to have sufficient food.

Economists
are fully aware that the free market system is imperfect. Markets
provide all those commodities that some enterprise can make a profit
producing. But some of our major needs are not met by for-profit
enterprises: most of our schools are not for profit. The record of
for-profit education is inglorious. While many health care
providers—insurance companies, physicians, drug companies, and
medical appliances companies make plenty of money, they cannot
produce health care that the majority of Americans can afford. People
have to go without health care or receive government subsidies.
For-profit health care is not a success because it is not accessible
for most
of Americans.

Police and fire protection are not for
profit, neither are bridges and roads. Parks, museums and symphony
orchestras are non-profit. Building public monuments, Boy and Girl
Scouts, Youth sports, the Ymca's and Ywca's are not profit making
undertakings. Large parts of our lives are not serviced by the
market.

We have known this for a long time.
Corporate leaders and the “experts” in their pay are the only
folks who deny this. But their opinion reflects self-interest, not
facts. There is absolutely no evidence for their claim that the free
market solves all economic problems.

But now we are discovering another market
failure of our capitalist system: it does not provide enough jobs,
let along enough jobs that pay enough for people not to go hungry.

These failures of the market account for
poverty at home. Widespread hunger abroad is due to hypocritical and
unscrupulous interference with attempts of other countries to feed
their hungry populations.

Countries such as India and South Africa
have food security programs that buy the farmers' crops at
“administered prices” above market value, to stabilize prices and
pay struggling farmers a living wage. Crops purchased by the
government feed the poor.

The
United States and other developed nations want to place harsh
restrictions on these
subsidies
and on efforts to reduce the hunger of the poor. They decry it as
restraint on the free operation of the market. Developed countries
produce agricultural products more cheaply than small farmers in the
underdeveloped world. They can undersell local farmers, put them out
of business and add to the poverty in places such as India or South
Africa. The developed countries try to prevent poverty reduction in
the under-developed world because it hinders their unfettered pursuit
of profits for
themselves.
Mass starvation is of no interest to them as long as they can make
more money. In their pursuit of profit, first
world agricultural
producers are completely unscrupulous.

But
their attempts to limit anti-hunger efforts in poor countries is also
utterly hypocritical because the US and other developed countries
also support agricultural prices through subsidies to farmers. At
home they are willing to compromise their enthusiasm for the free
market, at least when it benefits large agricultural corporations,
but when it comes to saving the poor from hunger abroad, free markets
come first.

Millions of people go hungry and die
young because capitalist markets fail us in important respects.
Pretending to be devoted to free markets and free trade when all they
are looking to is their private profit, capitalists make their
economic system even more destructive.

When they come around to tell you about
the blessings of the free market, run the other way.

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Who is to Blame?

The killings of young black men
in Ferguson and, more recently, in Saint Louis and in many other
places, as well as the recent report by the American Civil Liberties
Union that in Boston black men are much more likely to be stopped,
and interrogated by police than whites, has once again drawn
attention to racist practices by many police forces all over this
country.

In their treatment of black
men, especially young ones, many police forces are out of control.

Large scale, continuing
protests by many Americans, black and white, show that many of us are
appalled by this resurgence of anti-Black racism. Actually, it is not
a resurgence at all. The racism has been there all along but lately
it has been so dramatic that even we whites cannot overlook it any
more.

Clearly serious changes have to
be made. Racist police practices have to be stopped.

At the same time, as a white
man, I worry that we will once again take the easy way out and point
the finger at individual police officers and individual police chiefs
and put all the blame on them.

Whites, liberals and leftists,
do that to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the
continuing racism that poisons our society. We blame the police, we
blame “the government,” we may also blame mass media. Some are
critical of the supposed Archie Bunkerism of the working class. But
they do not understand that everyone, even white anti-racists, as
members of this deeply racist culture, are implicated in its
maintenance.

At
the heart of racism is the belief that Black people are significantly
different
from
whites, that, with very few exceptions, they share certain
characteristics which are overwhelmingly negative. Black people are
different, they share specific qualities, and those make them
undesirable members of a white society.

The white anti-racist rejects
that last belief: Blacks, anti-racists believe, are not inferior to
whites. But what is very difficult for us white anti-racists to give
up is the idea of a largely homogenous group--”Blacks” or
“African-Americans”--which is significantly different from us
whites. Growing up in racist America, white anti-racists are also
imbued with this map of our society in which distinct and
significantly different groups—Blacks and Whites—live together
uneasily. Racist whites regard the others as inferior; we anti-racist
whites regard them as equally as good as us, or sometimes as better,
and at other times as victims of racism whom we, white anti-racists,
need to assist in their struggle for liberation.

But that is a mental map that
humiliates those regarded as different. There is great diversity
among Black people, in bodily characteristics, in mental traits, in
their emotional make-up, in abilities and interests. Blacks, just
like whites, think and feel differently about their looks, their
social status their histories as members of their families. Being
white is essential for the Neo-Nazi. It is insignificant for many
other whites. Lumping many, very different people under some common
label manifests one's disinterest in knowing them for who they are.
Not being interested in knowing a certain group of people is a way of
showing contempt and disrespect. Approaching strangers and acting as
if one knew them already—being prejudiced, pre-judging others—is
profoundly insulting.

Some people respond to that
difficulty by claiming to be “colorblind.” But ignoring the
racial divisions that exist in housing, in education, in employment,
in incarceration rates, and elsewhere is just another way of helping
to maintain racist divisions. The evils you ignore can continue to
exist without your opposition.

White anti-racists confront a
serious dilemma. On the one hand we should treat each individual as
the individual they are and not worry much about their group
characteristics. On the other hand a racist society does lump people
into groups and in so far as these distinctions are often unjust we
cannot ignore them.

So our task is complex. We must
resist the injustices done by racism and racists to a specific group
of people. We must at the same time train ourselves not to think of
these persons only as members of their group but take them
individually as fully seriously as we want to be taken seriously
ourselves. We must stop talking about “they”; we must learn not
to notice their group membership as the outstanding characteristic of
persons we meet. When you meet someone you do not know, you not an “African-American,” a woman, a white. You meet a person unknown and it is your job to find out who this person is. We
demand from others that they see us for who we really are, and we
hope to see others for the individual person they are, with their own
history, and their own outlook on the world. We must learn ourselves,
and teach others, not to allow group characteristics to come between
us and the other person.

Racism will not disappear as
long as we only see types and not unique human beings. Most of us
find it quite difficult to get beyond the group traits through which
our society defines us. We maintain the racial and gender and
disabilities maps that are part of our culture. To that extent we are
complicit in the racial injustices committed in this world,
regardless of how hard and sincerely we are fighting them.